Certainly the End of Something or Other

A new book by the podcasters behind Aufhebunga Bunga tries to make sense of recent political history and the so-called return of politics.
The final shot from the film "Planet of the Apes"
(Photo illustration by Tony Hoffarth / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In the summer of 1989, RAND Corporation functionary and Bush-era State Department director Francis Fukuyama declared that world history, finally, was over. “What we may be witnessing” in the softening of Soviet hostility to America and Western Europe, he argued in an essay for The National Interest, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” The twentieth century had been a kind of Hunger Games for political systems from the dust of which Western liberal democracy and Actually Existing Socialism emerged as the last remaining contenders, and the agonism between the two ideologies and regimes was the engine that propelled history. And in the death of Stalin, the ongoing unrest in the Eastern Bloc, the slow cessation of Soviet hostility to America, and Gorbachev’s turn toward glasnost and perestroika, Fukuyama detected a seismic shift. “It is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history,” he surmised—but this something pointed not to a stable peace between communism and liberalism or to a friendly synthesis of the two, but to “an unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism.” Months later the Berlin Wall fell and liberal revolutions overthrew communism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; within two years of Fukuyama’s article, “the former Soviet Union” became a regular and uncontroversial turn of phrase in newspapers everywhere.

Fukuyama’s article made him both a celebrity and a rhetorical punching-bag. Criticism abounded: the argument was deemed self-evidently ridiculous, historically and socially myopic, ethnocentric to the point of sinister. (Connections were made to his former teacher Samuel P. Huntington, famous for his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.) But for sympathizers, especially after Fukuyama’s prescience was proven, the era of liberal triumphalism had begun. With Soviet communism consigned to the dustbin of history, liberal democracy was finally left without any substantive challenges to its march across the globe. Safe from any serious competition, the erstwhile “arsenal of democracy” could lay down its arms and turn its attention to the peacetime efforts of enriching itself and devising new and ever more exciting forms of entertainment while letting human rights bloom across the globe.

Or so it seemed, until 2016. The election of Donald J. Trump to the helm of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world and the success of Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union brought the End of History to an end. The neoliberal technocratic governance that characterized politics at the End of History had been rejected from below, by legions of disaffected citizens unhappy with the established consensus—and alongside this right-populist groundswell emerged the left-populism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, who challenged the liberal gridlock from the other side. The people want politics, it seems, whatever the flavor. And with politics comes conflict, and with conflict the possibility of history.

This is the story told by Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe—British academics by day, hosts of the podcast Aufhebunga Bunga by night—in their new book The End of the End of History. “To grasp the notion that politics was back,” they write, “and to understand the profound sense of disorder that is a feature of our age, we need to go back to the End of History. … Only when we recall the tedium of the age—that sense that staid neoliberal democracy was all there was—can we grasp how shocking the return of politics since 2016 has been.” And only by grasping what happened between the End of History and the End of the End, they argue, can the Left—their political faction of choice—figure out how to seize the future.

The neoliberal hegemony following the End of History, they argue, ushered in an age of “post-politics,” “a form of government that tries to foreclose political contestation by emphasizing consensus, ‘eradicating’ ideology and ruling by recourse to evidence and expertise rather than interests or ideals.” Despite an abundance of paeans to “change” and “progress” by the bards of liberal democracy, the post-political era was marked by a total foreclosure of political contestation rather than a new blossoming of possibility. Governance was deemed too important to be influenced by average citizens, and decision-making—especially for economic issues—was outsourced to a cluster of bureaucracies and institutions that sprang up around Washington, DC like mushrooms after a spring rain, populated by a caste of manager-experts drawn from the top universities in the country. Protest against the new consensus became increasingly carnivalesque and desperate as it found it impossible to make any lasting political impact. Two main tendencies emerged on the Left. In the first, anarchism and the Situationists became vogue, and attention was turned away from production and distribution toward the spectacular domain of media and advertising. In the second, books like Hardt and Negri’s Empire told a story in which all the disparate movements and projects—feminism, environmentalism, student activism, anti-globalization—constituted a Lord-of-the-Rings-style alliance of all the good guys called the Multitude. The 9/11 attacks and the wave of repression that followed mostly put an end to these movements, however, and the anti-war protests that followed the invasion of Iraq carried the air of futility from the jump. “Despite millions on the street,” the authors note grimly, “it never felt like the war might be stopped. Indeed, perma-war continues to this day.”

“For a book concerned with the aims of anti-neoliberal populism, the authors are conspicuously unconcerned with the actual content of populist demands.”

Post-politics sought to depoliticize society; the force currently working against this neoliberal depoliticization they dub “anti-politics.” In America, this looks like Trumpian belligerence and hatred of “elites”; in the UK, Brexit; in Brazil, both anti-corruption activism and the Bolsonaro regime that won power in its wake. Anti-politics is driven by an emphasis on dissensus and refusal, and characterized by a rejection of the political establishment as such; it takes issue with the very ideas of authority and political representation, proudly declaring the bankruptcy of institutions and the nakedness of the emperor. But it can also serve as a cudgel to break the deadlock of post-politics, allow for the reemergence of the political, and bring an end to the End of History.

But what, exactly, does it mean to bring back the political? What is politics, anyway? The strangeness at the heart of the book follows from the authors’ definition of the term. “Politics at its most essential,” they write “is the demand for reordering statuses and upending hierarchies. It is a demand for equality; it is even the basic notion of contestation.” Elsewhere, they define “politicization” as “the putting of things into question or into dispute,” as if any questioning whatsoever were ultimately an issue of power and its implementation. Regardless, their commitment to this broad definition of politics conflicts with the narrowness of their perspective. For a book concerned with—and often sympathetic to—the aims of anti-neoliberal populism, the authors are conspicuously unconcerned with the actual content of populist demands.

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Take for example their assessment of Brazil, their “most crystalline example” of how anti-political disruption—particularly in the form of anti-corruption campaigns—opens the door for the victory of “right-wing authoritarian populism.” Protests against public transportation fare hikes in São Paulo in 2013 grew into a massive, nationwide revolt, making Brazil the latest in a series of countries—Iceland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, the Arab Spring countries, etc.—whose public order would disintegrate in a popular uprising against police brutality and government corruption. Not only were Brazil’s left-wing parties generally feckless and disorganized, the party that had presided over the previous two decades of corruption and repression was Lula de Silva’s Workers’ Party (PT), the largest left-wing party in Latin America. After the party was implicated in a campaign of money laundering and bribery with the state-owned oil company Petrobras—featuring extensive kickbacks reserved for Lula himself—and a wave of austerity measures were initiated by Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff following a crippling recession, PT became the object of popular scorn. The mess of sentiments bringing bodies into the streets congealed into antipetismo (anti-Workers’ Partyism): the moral authority of the PT—“until 2005 widely seen as a principled, ethical force”—had collapsed.

In the vacuum of authority that followed, after institutions, parties, and left-wing idealism had lost all credibility, the negativity of antipetismo sought a positive vision and found it in the last one available: nationalism. “My party is my country’ became a common slogan,” the authors write mournfully, “with protesters decked out in only the green and gold of the national flag.” And in the next elections of 2018, this anti-establishment, nationalistic sentiment coalesced around a seven-term law-and-order congressman from Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro, who won an eleven-point victory over his opponent from the Workers’ Party. From this turn of events, the book’s authors take the lesson: “If politics no longer offers any hope, best to seek refuge in family and faith, to defend that which is dear—with arms if need be.”

So politics is for putting things into question—but not that! Politics is for reordering statuses and upending hierarchies—but not those! Politics is the basic notion of contestation—but only concerning those things Marxist academics care about, not normies whose understanding of politics comes from something closer to the gut, informed by nearly a century of aggressive political encroachment upon those spheres of human life that the American political tradition long accepted as standing outside the purview of state and bureaucratic power. (It is bizarre, for instance, that a book seeking explain the rise of 21st century populism in the West would lack a single instance of the word “abortion.”) The idea that democratic politics might be about something like establishing a political community one would be proud to bequeath to their descendants is strangely outside their purview, and likely inconsistent with the notion of politics as pure contestation. Parents rearing children and people seeking the security and support of a community want the warring to end somewhere: politics in this case is an instrument, a means for achieving not just stability or peace—as the architects of post-political neoliberalism believed—but justice.

Historian John Lukacs wrote that “at the end of an age we must engage in a radical rethinking of ‘Progress,’ of history, of ‘Science,’ of the limitations of our knowledge, of our place in the universe.” And at the end of the End of History, on this cusp between what was and what will be, it is of the utmost importance that we reconsider what we think we know about politics. Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe are right that the post-Cold-War neoliberal consensus tried to “overcome”—that is, suppress—politics with economics and technocracy: all questions about the character of common life irreducible to quantities in a spreadsheet were deemed irrelevant, irrational. Whatever helped melt the world into capital to be moved across the globe was deemed licit if not obligatory, no matter the damage done to people and the communities they constituted. If justice meant anything at the End of History, it was ultimately reducible to money—and most of our age’s political tendencies tended to agree. Both right-wing anti-tax crusades and the left-wing calls for a more robust welfare state are, according to the best representatives of each camp, aimed at a kind of moneyed justice: of finding ways to make a rising tide that lifts all boats. They might disagree on the specifics, but they agree on the fundamentals.

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Breaking out of the post-political paradigm, then, would involve putting economism and technocracy up for question, of finding a new way to think about politics beyond the narrow parameters agreed upon by the political tendencies of our age. It would mean putting into question the very nature of politics itself—not by politicizing politics, whatever that would mean, but by philosophizing it. It would mean putting up for question the very idea of a “politics…rooted in the self-interest of producers,” to consider that the problem runs far deeper—to take seriously, for example, Jacques Camatte’s contention that the proletariat is no longer the agent of capital’s undoing, but the final agent of capital’s domination over the very nature of the human being. It would mean rejecting inherited concepts and asking again the question that lies at the very beginning of political thinking, that animates Socrates’ search for the nature of political things in Plato’s Republic: “What is justice?” Such thoughts and questions make political action difficult, of course. But what better time for entering into such a tangle than in the midst of a “low-grade dystopia” following “the defeat of left-populism and the final death of social democracy”?

The populist explosion of the last ten years has been one of the most unpredictable and confounding developments of the last several decades. Countless brilliant, highly-trained specialists failed to predict Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election or the success of the Brexit referendum—but nonetheless proceeded to speak and act after the fact as if their expertise remained fully intact. Professional explainers have crawled out of nearly every academic and media institution the world over, writing books and essays about how the populist insurgency proves them right about everything they already believe. Compared with others like it, The End of the End of History is a fine book: it is a reliable guide to recent political history with a breadth of perspective that puts other “history of the present” books to shame. But it would have been a much better book if the authors had taken the populist insurgency for what it truly is: a rebuke of supposed expert knowledge of the contemporary political landscape and, more radically, an opportunity to reconsider shallow presuppositions about the nature and purpose of politics.

Author
Joseph M. Keegin is a former schoolteacher and an editor at Athwart and The Point.
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